The Ballad of Ben and Annie
by stefanie bean
Summary: She was the light of his dark childhood, torn from him by circumstances. Then, in the midst of war, she returned.
1. The Hollow Men

**Chapter 1: The Hollow Men**

_We are the hollow men  
We are the stuffed men  
Leaning together  
Headpiece filled with straw.  
\- _T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

__Ben Linus met Annie Lamont at the age of eight, a friendless, motherless child brought to the Island by his father in early 1973. The recession hit Portland before a lot of places, and no one wanted Roger to paint their houses or barns anymore. Roger skated along from one odd job to the next, but like the song said, all he got was "another day older and deeper in debt."

Then there was the probation. All he did was sell a little speed, twenty bucks worth. What was all the fuss about? It's not like he was some big-time dealer. For two years Roger couldn't leave the state, and that sure cut down on the jobs. If somebody needed him in Vancouver or Mt. Vista, he was shit-out-of-luck. So the less Roger worked, the more he drank, until that day when he got a phone call from somebody named Horace.

"Old Whore-ass," Roger said to the uncomprehending Ben, laughing as if the boy had joined in, rather than staring blankly. A few phone calls later, Roger made the announcement: they were moving. Leaving this shit-stained town for good, because Old Whore-ass had offered him a job. Best of all, he got Roger's probation lifted, so that he could go in the first place. It was kind of complicated; even Roger himself didn't know how Horace Goodspeed had pulled it off.

"Lawyers, I guess," Roger snickered. "These rich bastards, they all got lawyers."

* * *

When a sick, dazed Ben got off the submarine, he was hers from the first moment he caught a glimpse of her across the dock. They didn't speak until he saw her again in the Dharma Recruitment Station, but it was enough. Their friendship sparked up suddenly and caught fire.

As the new kid in school, Ben was too shy to talk to anyone, even Annie. Sure, she'd given him a candy bar at the Dharma Initiative Orientation Station, but this was different. This was school, and he didn't blame her for not returning his glance every time he tried to catch her eye. Then Miss Olivia announced that because Ben was new, they would do something special. They'd been interrupted by that unfortunate Hostiles attack, but now they would have some fun.

The volcano demonstration continued. They were to get into pairs and make one of their own. Miss Olivia put Ben and Annie together, and Ben thought his heart would burst with anticipation. When Annie's flour volcano exploded, turning her into a gnomish old lady with thick white pigtails, her mouth forming a pink round "O" in her astonished face, Ben knew that he loved her.

Roger hated living on the Island. When Ben came home from school, Roger lay half-asleep on the couch instead of working. "No television," Roger griped. "If they would have told me there was no TV, I'd have never come. A man can't even watch the goddamn fights."

Sometimes Roger did stay asleep, and Ben tiptoed past, hoping not to wake him. If Roger did stir, Ben would have to listen to a whining, slurred monologue, which ended with a smack, or a beer can tossed across the room at Ben's head.

Annie's father never drank or hit her. Her parents worked in a laboratory somewhere else on the Island. No one was supposed to know where they went, not even Annie, who was ordered to stay in the house while they were gone. She didn't listen to them, of course. After her mother and father left, she roamed the Barracks and the outlying hills all the way to the sonic fence. It was either that, or sit in the lonely, bare cottage.

Whenever Roger caught Ben with Annie, he dragged him roughly away, or even cuffed him. "Why would she care to play with the likes of you? She's the daughter of a scientist, and you're a janitor's kid."

Ben told Annie everything: about Roger's bouts of drunkenness, the blows, even that he'd seen his dead mother in the window, on the night that the Hostiles tried to shoot up their school. Annie didn't laugh at him, or say that he was crazy.

Those golden days were bright enough to light up a lifetime.

His birthday arrived, the first on the Island, and with it her present. Miss Olivia had helped her get started, although Annie had done most of the work herself.

Ben took the crudely-painted wooden doll home, floating on air, until Roger shot him down like a clay pigeon. Just like Ben to remind Roger of the day that his mother died. Tear-stricken, Ben ran blindly to the sonic fence, where a strange woman stood pale in the moonlight.

Ben knew what would happen if he crossed the invisible sonic barrier. Terrified, twisted with emotion, he stumbled back to the Barracks. Instead of going straight home, he sneaked around back of Annie's house, and tossed one piece of gravel, then another at her window. Finally she stuck her head out.

"Your father's going to tan your hide," she said.

"I hate him. Hope he dies. I just came to tell you that I'm running away. And I want you to come with me."

She looked around to see if anyone was looking. "I'm scared, Ben. The jungle scares me."

"I'll go first. I'll make a place for us, where we can hide. We can go fishing and eat fruit. They'll never catch us."

"But there's Hostiles."

"We'll join them."

Her jaw dropped. Hoping it was true, Ben said, "They don't have to go to school or sit home by themselves all day. They run around the jungle and shoot things. They have fun." He really had Annie's attention now. "Tomorrow I'm going to find them."

When Ben came back, he took his punishment with a hard face and only a few tears. Nor did he tell Annie about the strange man he had met in the woods, the one with the funny clothes and long hair who told him that he had to be "very, very patient." Ben had come back to Annie empty-handed, and she knew it.

She didn't mention anything more about running away, and neither did he.

After Thanksgiving, everything collapsed. Annie met Ben at the gazebo, and in a voice thick with tears told him that she were moving to California. Her parents had brought her to the Island when she was two, and it was the only life she'd ever known. Why did they have to go work on some dumb Dharma station in Los Angeles? Didn't they have enough to do here? It wasn't fair. Now she had to move to some strange place, where she didn't know anyone.

As she sobbed, Ben's world imploded. He uttered one inanity after another. It wouldn't be too bad. She could go to Hollywood. She could watch movies in a real theater, not on a wrinkled screen set up in the Barracks cafeteria. There would be television, not grainy, jerky shows in the Barracks rec room.

Annie stared at him, and her silence sizzled like the fuse of a bomb. Then she spun around and fled with such energy that when the tears flew off her face, a few hit Ben's cheek.

A few weeks later she was gone, leaving Ben to the loneliest birthday of his young life.

Two summers later, Ben had some kind of accident. All he could remember was waking up in a tent with that strange man from the jungle and a bunch of his friends. The man called himself Richard, and he and his friends called themselves the "Good People." Ben stayed with them a week, before they dropped him off at the sonic fence.

For months afterward his memory was a tangled jumble, but he never forgot Annie.

During his sickness there had been a terrible accident at one of the drilling sites, and most of the moms and their kids had left, but not Ben or Roger.

Months passed, and only a few children came back to the Island. Miss Olivia squeezed everybody into one classroom, but one by one the few older kids drifted away, because it was too boring to listen to Miss Olivia teach the first graders how to read. She let them go, because the little ones still looked at her with love and adoration, rather than with the simmering hatred which poured off the older children.

* * *

At sixteen, Ben put on a workman's uniform, and joined his father mopping floors and scrubbing toilets. But there was always a book in Ben's back pocket. By then he was working closely with Richard.

Ben had keys to every Dharma Initiative office in the Barracks. Sometimes he stole papers, but mostly he put his prodigious memory to work. He quickly scanned memos or papers, then followed up later with a flawless redaction to Richard, or the Good People's leader Charles Widmore.

Even though the Barracks weren't crowded anymore, Ben continued to live with Roger Linus. No one would have cared if he took a bunk in the dormitories or even squatted in a house of his own. Richard didn't want him to, though, and for Ben, Richard's word was law.

Ben didn't miss Annie that much anymore, even though there were no girls his age at the Barracks. Most of the women were older, and the few girls were just kids. Even Horace and Amy had no more children after Ethan. Ben always had a kind word or treat for the little squirt, because Ben felt sorry for him growing up alone like that. He could relate.

Whispers and rumors floated through the Barracks. The few women who did get pregnant were hastily evacuated, and none of them came back. Wherever they went, Ben neither knew nor cared.

Richard was getting more agitated, too. While he never criticized what Ben brought him, he wanted medical records, and that meant trips to the infirmary, which Ben hated. He couldn't say why. Whenever he walked by the low-slung yellow building, cold fingers of fear clutched his throat. But he did what Richard asked.

Richard was particularly interested in the new station being built in a remote jungle location far south of the Barracks. What were they up to? Why were they moving medical supplies there? Whatever documents there were, Ben could find them.

Ben took lessons from Richard, too, like none he'd ever had in Miss Olivia's school. How to move through the trees and make no sound. How to find his way around the Island using only the sun or the stars. How to live on the forest's bounty, and if none could be found, how to endure starvation and thirst.

On other days, Richard didn't lay harsh woodcraft lessons on Ben, or press him for information. Sometimes they simply sat under the tall trees and talked.

Ben treasured those moments above all.

As sunlight filtered through the great ironwood trees, Richard's words played over Ben like a soothing violin. There was a war going on, long before Ben was even born. In early 1953, sailors with gigantic ships full of concrete, supplies and guns had come to the Island. They brought soldiers with them who built a radio tower, so that they could talk to their massive supply ships.

Then dozens more ships arrived, loaded down with supplies. Sweating in the tropical heat, the men mixed concrete for the bunkers which they planted all over the Island. They chopped down ancient trees and started building what looked like a small town in the Island's northern center.

The men's canvas tents dotted the Island's green fields like fever blisters. The oblivious soldiers never knew that the Good People watched them constantly. They cut trees for firewood, hunted boar, and littered the beaches with their cigarette butts. They speared crabs with bayonets, or shot seagulls for target practice. They cursed the sun, the sea, and especially the lack of native women. They even missed the Honolulu brothels, because two hours in line for ten minutes of fun was better than nothing.

Some of the Good People wanted to strike right away, drive them off the Island, even kill them, but Richard talked them out of it. It was Jacob's will. Let them do what they came for, whatever that was.

So the soldiers continued to build. Nine months later, a whole mock town had grown up, complete with community center and even an officer's club. The military leaders had arguments which Richard couldn't understand, just that something had gone wrong with some test. Eventually the officers and their aides moved into the village called the Barracks, leaving the rest of the men to roam the Island.

A year after the sailors arrived, a young Royal Australian marine named Charles Widmore strode into the Good People's camp. Bold as brass, he demanded to speak to Richard, alone. When Richard emerged from the meeting, he shook as if with fever.

Richard had heard of artillery, even seen it in action. But Widmore's story was incredible. The new men were building something they had named Jacob's Ladder, part of a project called Operation Castle.

The gigantic iron cylinder coated with lead was called Jughead, and was designed to blow up directly on the Island itself. Military scientists would observe from their ship, fifty miles offshore. Afterward, they would survey what was left, especially of the Barracks, as the whole point was to find out what damage a ten-megaton ground burst would do to a small American town.

"Why are you telling us this?" Richard wanted to know.

"Because I like it here," Widmore answered. "I didn't go AWOL just to get buried under a pile of radioactive glass."

Richard tied Widmore to a tree and threatened him with torture for his outrageous lies. Then Richard went to speak with Jacob, wondering if Widmore might actually be telling the truth. No one could concoct such an extravagant story with a straight face. Who could believe that big cylinder of lead could destroy entire islands, cities even, whose fireball would consume everything, leaving only glass or ash? Unbelievable, yet Jacob must be told.

Jacob sat at the sea-side in front of a simmering pot full of twigs and sticks, dyeing some linen fabric. As he spooned the golden-brown cloth around in the pot, he seemed unconcerned, indifferent, even.

Yes, he knew of these bombs which had already brought two cities to rubble. Yes, he knew what an explosion like that might do to the Island. Then Jacob kept on stirring.

"Aren't you at least worried about this Widmore?" Richard said.

Jacob gave Richard a long, world-weary look, not even annoyed. "Why? I brought him here."

Two days later, Richard returned to find Widmore strolling about the camp-site free as you please. Most of the Good People had already pledged their fealty to him, including the tender and beautiful Ellie Hawking. At seventeen, she had just passed through the ritual of womanhood and was now at liberty to choose a man. Both the Good People and their new chieftain were of one mind. The sailors, soldiers, and officers of Joint Task Force One were to die. All of them.

Richard just shook his head, incredulous.

Something confused Ben, though, as he listened to Richard's story. "I thought you were the one in charge of the Good People."

It didn't work like that. He, Richard, was simply an advisor. An intercessor, if you will. And if the Good People had chosen a mere buck-private deserter and a fresh-faced girl of seventeen summers to lead them, that was no skin off Richard's nose, as foolish as Richard might have found it. Jacob would do as he willed.

Most of the Joint Task Force had already abandoned Jughead and the Island itself, leaving only a skeleton crew. After the Good People dispatched them all, they helped themselves to guns, tents, barrels of supplies. A few of the Good People even sailed over to the one remaining Joint Task Force research vessel, where they scuttled her, after killing the crew.

Long years of peace followed, where only those washed up in shipwrecks came to the Island. Those who didn't fall off cliffs or get torn to pieces in the jungle joined the Good People. It was a time of contentment, and Richard smiled as he remembered it.

Richard also told Ben the story of Jacob. He was a great man, more than a man, almost. He held all of them in the palm of his hand, cared for them, protected them. Jacob's love was like God's, and like God, Jacob had chosen them to be his special people. They weren't only the Good People; they were Jacob's People as well.

So while the soldiers and sailors with their bomb had started the war, their departure didn't finish it, not by a long shot. For after an interlude of peace, the Dharma Initiative showed up.

Richard didn't understand why Jacob had let the Dharma research group move into the old military bunkers and barracks, or let them set up their experimental stations all over the Island. Nor could Richard see why Jacob looked the other way when the newcomers hunted down the Good People on a lark, or took them to Hydra Island as experimental subjects. There had to be some good reason.

"What was that reason?" Ben wanted to know.

Jacob's ways weren't their ways, Richard explained. He was never to be challenged or questioned, only obeyed.

"I'm ready to obey. Anything. Anything Jacob wants me to do, I'll do."

"I appreciate that, Benjamin. But you need to be patient. There are still many things which you haven't learned."

As in any war, Richard explained, the good guys had a right to defend themselves, and when they did, there would always be collateral damage. That's why Richard needed Ben to keep doing his job. He was the best spy they'd ever had in the whole course of this great war. Despite multiple truces, the Dharma people broke their promises time and again. They couldn't be trusted, and that's why Richard needed Ben.

Richard leaned in to Ben, his piercing eyes dark and serious. There were things under the earth, Island forces that shouldn't be disturbed. That's why the Good People had insisted on no drilling, ever.

Further, there were places on the Island where Dharma was to never go, places special to Jacob. Dharma went there anyway, dug their mines and planted their generators. The data Ben gathered gave the Good People what they needed to slow them down. What Ben did was crucial to the war. And one day Jacob would personally thank him for it.

So for years Ben worked with Richard from behind the sonic fence. His days lurched between long bouts of unrelieved janitorial tedium and heart-stopping instances when it seemed he would be caught. But he never was.

Then, at the start of a new year with no more hope than any of the old ones, Annie returned.

* * *

She stood on the dock, unsteady from the submarine voyage, long blonde hair blowing in the breeze. She clutched a small suitcase like it was the only stable vantage point in a wildly rollicking world. The lean, scruffy man next to her was her father, entirely gray now.

Annie had grown, but Ben would have known her anywhere. Her eyes, though, were hard and sad, as if she had suffered on long, difficult roads.

He had just turned twenty-one.

At first Ben didn't see much of her. Dr. Lamont's work often took him away from the Barracks, and Annie went along. On some golden afternoons, though, Dr. Lamont went to conferences with Horace Goodspeed, and Ben and Annie would sit in the gazebo like they used to, not touching, just enjoying one another's company.

Usually she shrank in on herself, but more often the old sweet smile peeked forth as small bits of her history came out. Her mom had left them and gone back to Ann Arbor. They were getting a divorce, but that was fine with Annie, because her mom had never been home much anyway. Her dad finished up his Dharma work in Los Angeles and decided to come back to the Island. Annie didn't want to, but she had no job and no money of her own. She had just flunked out of college after two years of complete disinterest.

Her laugh was hollow. "My dad doesn't know what to do with me."

One day Annie and her father had a fight on the commons lawn, while Ben and Roger raked leaves around the gazebo. Ben pretended to ignore them, but he heard everything. Annie announced that she was staying in their house at the Barracks from now on, instead of going to that horrible station in the mountains.

"It's boring as hell," she shouted. "Type one column of numbers after another onto punch cards, then feed them into the card readers, while you fiddle with equipment all day long. I'm sick of sleeping on a cot instead of a proper bed, with computers keeping me up all night. No wonder they call it 'the Tempest.' It's certainly loud as one!"

Her father tried to hush her. "Quiet! Don't say that name, that's a classified project!"

She kept shouting at him. He was crazy if he thought she was returning to college on the mainland. She wasn't going anywhere. She liked it here on the Island. At twenty, she could do as she pleased.

The argument swerved onto a whole new tack.

"What do you think you're going to do with your life?" her father raged, no longer caring who heard. "I have two PhDs, one in physics, one in chemistry. You couldn't even pass college algebra."

Only his influence at UCLA had gotten her in, in the first place. Ungrateful, that's what she was. Nothing but ingratitude since she was a child. "Frittering away your time on nothing." What was he going to do with her? She might as well stay in the Barracks, because she was useless to his research, with no inclination for the simplest scientific tasks.

"You should just put on a workman's uniform, like those two over there." Dr. Lamont waved at Ben, who winced and looked away even as he continued to rake. But Ben didn't forget. He never forgot.

(_continued_)


	2. Deliberate Disguises

**Chapter 2: Deliberate Disguises**

_Let me also wear_

_Such deliberate disguises_

_Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves..._

_Behaving as the wind behaves  
\- _T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

Annie went to work serving in the cafeteria where the Dharma scientists took their meals. Her father must have gotten his work assignment changed, because he spent more time working with the Goodspeeds, and didn't go up to the Tempest Station that much anymore. On most evenings and weekends Annie baby-sat Ethan, who at eight was a handful, his boundless energy unspent because there were no other children his age to play with.

Of all the Dharma Initiative children, Ethan Goodspeed was the last.

That marked the dawn of Ben's and Annie's days. He stole the security code, and the two of tehm slipped past the sonic fence into the jungle. Ben navigated the paths to the Good People as easily as he crept around his own dark house, trying not to wake Roger. Annie, though, had never left the Barracks, never wandered through the towering green jungle. Every indrawn breath of hers, every expression of wonder sent Ben's heart soaring.

Then one day, by the big river which split the Island in two, Ben and Annie ran into Richard.

At first Ben thought Richard would be angry that they explored the woods. Instead, Richard spoke so kindly to Annie that within fifteen minutes she was wiping away tears. She hated her parents, she told him. Her father had driven her mother away, and her mother had left without even looking back. Ben knew Richard well enough to know how interested he was in what Annie had to say, especially the parts about the Tempest Station and what the Dharma Initiative had going on up there.

At one point Richard put his arm around Annie, and drew the sniffling girl close to his chest. A flash of adult jealousy licked through Ben, so hot that he wanted to slit Richard's throat right then and there. When Richard caught the look in Ben's eye, he let the girl go at once. Ben pulled Annie to him so that she nestled in his arms, wiped her face on his shirt sleeve, as Richard told them about the next stage of the war.

For war was coming, they could bet on that.

As if it had been her idea all along, Annie wanted to help. Richard promised that someday she and Ben could leave the Dharma village, to live with Jacob's People out in the great jungle. For now, though, Annie was to work in the cafeteria and keep her ears open for anything about the Tempest. If her father had any papers or blueprints locked away at home, Richard could use those, too. Finally, Annie was to help Ben make lists of everyone who went in and out of the Barracks, as well as on and off the _Galaga_, the Dharma Initiative submarine.

So while Ben pushed his mop, Annie dished up macaroni salad and canned-beef Stroganoff in the Barracks cafeteria, and they both spied on the Dharma Initiative.

Roger, though, Roger never changed. He couldn't go back to Portland because of the debts he had racked up working for Dharma. Food, clothing, and a modest house were all provided, as well as a salary and a generous sign-on bonus. Nor did Roger pay any taxes; he never figured out how that worked. It had sounded pretty good at the time: all expenses paid, wages tax free.

In a rare fit of honor, Roger used his sign-on bonus to settle his many debts before leaving Oregon. It didn't stop there, either. Disoriented and lonely, Roger joined the poker games run by his new best buddies in the motor pool. Too late he discovered that underneath the beer and camaraderie, the smiling men weren't rookie players at all. Instead, they snookered him good.

Roger's new friends told him that non-payment meant a midnight ride outside the fence, and people usually didn't come back from those. Not in one piece, anyway.

Then there were all the little luxuries. Roger only drank sour Dharma beer or tannic wine when there was nothing else. Whiskey, cigarettes, the potato chips and beef jerky strips which he craved, all those things cost money.

Not just any normal amount of money either. All these treats had to be shipped to the Island at high cost, and the charges went onto Roger's account, with interest. The more Roger hated, the more he drank, and the more he drank, the more his debt slavery deepened. All Roger's hatred focused on Horace Goodspeed, whom he blamed for getting him into this mess in the first place.

Ben didn't hate Horace, and not just because Horace's office provided the choicest morsels for Richard's consumption. Annie spent many an evening babysitting Ethan while Horace and Amy went to meetings. Amy rifled through Amy and Horace's drawers, as well as the delectable contents of their refrigerator, stocked with delicacies like butter, whipped cream and chocolate.

Best of all, the Goodspeeds didn't mind if Ben visited when Annie was there. Ethan loved them both, too. He begged for Annie to watch him even when Horace and Amy didn't have meetings, and soon Annie watched Ethan almost every evening. Horace and Amy were fond of the quiet, self-possessed girl, even though they didn't feel as sorry for Ben as they should have, not with his staring eyes and stiff mannerisms.

After Ethan had gone to sleep, Ben and Annie would sit on the front porch, kissing and whispering softly. Once Annie asked, "They won't hurt Horace and Amy when they come, will they?"

"Of course not," Ben answered. If he said that he really didn't know, Annie might pull her small hand out of his. He had tried to ask Richard that very question, but all Richard said was that in time of war, a man had to decide what side he was on. The Dharma people weren't good people, even the kind ones.

Once Ben and Annie fully joined the genuine Good People, they would understand. Until then, Ben would just have to trust Richard, because by trusting Richard, Ben and Annie were actually trusting Jacob. That's how you knew if you were one of the Good People: you trusted Jacob. Jacob knew what was right. He knew who was good, and who wasn't. And one day, the Dharma Initiative would have to go.

* * *

At first Annie and Ben slept together in the forest, but stopped when they discovered how many eyes there were in the jungle, always spying, always watching the Dharma folk as they went to and fro. Her own house was out of the question, because Annie's father didn't go to work anymore. He spent his days inside in a darkened bedroom, lying on the bed or sitting in a chair with head in hands. The Goodspeed's house was fine for necking on the porch or raiding the refrigerator, but Ethan was watchful and sometimes walked in his sleep.

So they trysted in the abandoned houses which grew more dust-covered and musty with time. Annie had brought a year's worth of pills from Los Angeles, and Ben tried not to think of why she had them in the first place. Eventually she ran out, so she scrounged what few prophylactics she could find in the abandoned houses. One night she rummaged through the infirmary's sparsely-stocked shelves, but didn't find anything.

She asked around the cafeteria, or the community center where the remaining few women gathered to knit or dabble in water-colors. Those young enough to worry about pregnancy all had had operations, the women told her. One of the new requirements if you wanted to stay on the Island.

Annie was too embarrassed to ask what kind of operation.

"We're out of the market," one older woman laughed.

Another woman fixed Annie with a stern look. "You'd better be careful, missy," but clammed up after that.

The new Staff medical station was now operational. Its symbol was the winged rod of Hermes entwined with two serpents. "MDG: Medical Group research, Fert." was all that Ben could find in Horace's papers. From the account ledgers, Ben could tell that it was expensive, even more costly than the Tempest which Annie's father had tried to keep so concealed. Or maybe Horace was just dipping into the funds. What was Horace spending all that money on, at a medical station?

Ben had dutifully passed the documents on to Richard. No pills were on the inventories, but Dharma was getting sloppy, so maybe there were some already down there.

It was only half a day's walk, so Ben and Annie left early the next morning.

When they arrived, they weren't alone. Richard would have been proud of how they blended right into the underbrush, as the Good People had taught them. Black-clad Dharma security men tromped down the path, followed by a researcher who had given Ben science books in his childhood years.

That wasn't all. Between them, the security men frog-marched a bound, struggling girl, blinded by a bag over her head. Even though Ben and Annie couldn't see her face, her ragged earth-colored clothes showed her to be one of Jacob's People.

The Dharma men thought they had cleverly concealed the Staff's entrance, but any one of the Good People could have found it on a night with no moon. The girl must have sensed the open door, because she gave a mighty kick to the right, then the left. One of the security men let her go, and she would have gotten away had not the other man clubbed her on the head, hard.

Down she went like a sack of flour.

"Sorry," the security man said.

"That doesn't matter," the researcher answered. "Her head's not the part of her that we need."

Ben and Annie gaped from behind their leafy screen, eyes wide with horror. They slipped back into the forest, pills forgotten. Never before had they dared approach the Good People's camp, but now they did. Twenty of Jacob's People stared at them in stone-faced silence, along with Richard and Charles Widmore.

When Widmore heard what Ben and Annie's story, his face grew red down to the roots of his thinning hair. From the dark shadows where the firelight didn't reach, someone called out, "Ellie would have never put up with this."

Another added, "She'd have stopped it in its tracks."

"Nipped it in the bud," came another voice.

This enraged Widmore even more. Without so much as a thank-you, he snarled that Ben and Annie had best get their disobedient little arses back to the Barracks before he horse-whipped them in front of everybody. He would take care of this situation himself.

The next day Ben and Annie sneaked out again, drawn as much by curiosity as the search for pills. The Staff station door stood wide open, and they almost tripped over a white medical lab coat soaked through with blood. Neither Ben nor Annie learned who the prisoner was, or what had happened to her. Nor did they ever see that particular Dharma researcher again.

All Ben and Annie knew was that the cold war had just turned hot.

* * *

Over the next few months, Ben began meeting with alone with Richard and Widmore, behind Annie's back.

Annie sensed the change. Where did he go all the time? Why couldn't they move in together, live as a couple? She was tired of sleeping with him in other people's houses, on other people's stale sheets, looking at the abandoned pictures on their walls, then creep home and pretend to her father that nothing was going on. Not that her father noticed, anyway.

Ben put the question to Richard, who issued a short, sharp "No." Ben was no longer a child, but there was something he and Annie needed to understand. They hadn't been ready to hear it before, but now they were. The Good People were like an army, because they fought for what was right. But they were like monks, too.

Yes, some of the Good People paired up, as Charles had with Ellie, even though those two hadn't stayed together. But the most dedicated among them didn't waste their time on marriage or families. Those were for people who weren't serious. Jacob had neither wife nor child, and the Good People were to emulate him as closely as possible. Their cause was to do Jacob's will, to devote themselves to Jacob entirely, body and soul.

If Ben and Annie were going to serve Jacob, they couldn't be selfish. They had to appear innocent as doves, yet be clever as serpents. They needed to look obedient to their parents, act above suspicion. Marriage and children distracted people from the full depth of service which Jacob required. Their first priority was to prepare for the upcoming battle, the righteous fight which would vindicate Jacob's name and secure the safety of the Island once and for all.

Ben kept silent through this lecture, not having the heart to tell Richard that Annie was already pregnant.

When Richard told Ben what was going to happen, he grew white with shock. For a few frantic seconds he thought about running away with Annie into the jungle, but just as quickly dropped that wild notion. The Good People could move silently through the forest with senses keen as an obsidian knife. They could blend into the brush and emerge invisibly to cut throats so swiftly that their victims felt no pain, just faded into unconsciousness and death.

If Ben took Annie into the woods, they wouldn't last till sunset.

Richard gave Ben a penetrating look and said, "You're not going soft on me now, are you?"

Widmore sat crouched near the fire. In blunt tones he said, "The time is now, boy, to shit or get off the pot."

Ben licked his dry lips, tried to swallow through a throat crammed with sand, and whispered that whatever Jacob wanted, he was ready to do.

"We're good to go, then," Richard said. "And remember, Ben. This is strictly on a need-to-know basis."

* * *

On December 19, 1987, the day of that massacre later known as the Purge, Ben awoke with a sick, sinking feeling. Today he turned twenty-three, but birthdays were the last thing on his mind.

He felt no guilt or regret for the mayhem about to rain down on the Barracks. He had never told Annie exactly what was going to happen on this day, just that there was to be a raid on the Barracks itself, so that Ben and some others could join Jacob's People for good. That was all she knew.

Early that morning, Ben waylaid Annie on her way to the kitchen and walked her behind a shed, where hopefully no one would see them.

"Don't go to work today. Trust me." She was to go to Horace and Amy's little cabin southeast of the Barracks. She knew the way, as she had taken Ethan there to play multiple times. Now she was to stay there until Ben came for her. Something in his voice told her that more than a simple raid was in the works.

She seemed to debate inside, fear mixed with excitement, then gave him a soft quick brush of lips across his mouth. She would wait for him there.

Then in afterthought, she asked, "What about Ethan? Shall I bring him with me?"

Ben shook his head. The few remaining children, including Ethan, were going to be taken to a swimming hole about two hours' walk from the Barracks. They would be safe there.

He handed her a gas-mask, and told her to put it on right when she got to Horace's cabin. As soon as he could, he'd join her.

It wasn't until late afternoon that Ben finally arrived. Annie had already made a fire, and set water on to boil for tea. He removed the gas-mask from her face, gathered her in his arms, and hoped she would ignore the acrid miasma of gas which clung to him. They drank strong dark tea and ate the goldfish crackers that the Dharma kids called "fish biscuits."

It was such a unique pleasure to be alone together, really alone. They pulled the curtains shut and lay on the rickety iron cot, where Ben praised her eyes, her hair, the whole beautiful length of her, and especially the plump out-swell of her belly. They came on and around and inside of each other's flesh, until in the last long bout of lovemaking, her cries of pleasure filled the cabin.

The next day at dawn he brought her back to Richard and the others. Even though Annie never saw her father's body, she cried a little for him. Nor did she ask Ben where his own father had gone. The corpses at the Barracks had been cleared away, although the tangy, too-sweet smell of gas hung in the air.

Widmore and Richard talked to the remaining young Dharma survivors. They were chosen, special. They would remake the Island into something better, but before they could do that, the old elements had to be purged.

Everything would be different now, Widmore went on. Their parents were gone, and they weren't to think about them anymore. They had new parents who would look after them and teach them. No longer would they live behind wooden walls and fences. Instead, they would live wild and free in the jungle, as they were meant to. It would be magnificent. They would see.

(_continued_)


	3. Cactus Land

**Chapter 3: Cactus Land**

_This is the dead land_**_  
_**_This is cactus land_**_  
_**_Here the stone images_**_  
_**_Are raised, here they receive_**_  
_**_The supplication of a dead man's hand_**_  
_**_Under the twinkle of a fading star.  
_**_\- _**T.S. Eliot, "The Hollow Men"

No one in the ranks of the Good People thought anything of it when Annie crept away from camp early in the morning to throw up behind the scrubby bushes. There had been almost no pregnant women on the Island since the mass evacuation over ten years before. Most of the young Dharma women were long gone, or had had their "operations." The women scientists were long past the age of bearing.

Among the women of Jacob's People, pregnancy was rare. Many took Richard Alpert's advice to heart and lived celibate lives, becoming warrior-priests and nuns for Jacob. Of the three women who had gotten with child in the past decade, one had stumbled off a cliff at ten weeks along, toppling into a ravine.

The second woman thought she was too old to fall pregnant. Her baby was born dead in the fifth month, and the mother herself died a few hours later. The other women told each other that it was because of her age, hoping it was true.

The third woman was young and strong, yet she grew sick halfway through her pregnancy, dying as well.

No one knew why, because sickness among Jacob's people was unknown. The older women blamed the mothers themselves. They must not have loved Jacob enough. They must have been disobedient. Just look at the woman who'd most recently died. She had a man of her own, but she had dallied with another in the jungle. It was her punishment.

Richard had no answer, and in fact, considered the whole question trivial. As he told them, he came from a place where women prayed desperately to the Blessed Virgin to survive childbirth, and half the time their prayers went unanswered. "In sorrow thou shalt bear children," his god had said. Only the Virgin herself had been spared the pain and danger. And if even the Blessed Virgin Mary's own mother Saint Anne had suffered in childbirth, why should the women of Jacob's tribe be any different?

No help came from Jacob, either. To Richard, Jacob dropped vague hints of chosen ones called "candidates," who would come from across the sea. That was more important than anything else. Jacob seemed as uninterested as Richard in the recent deaths.

Charles Widmore said nothing at all. His own children by two different women had been born off-Island. His lovers among the People raged, because they wanted babies of their own.

Thus, none of the women among Jacob's People had fallen pregnant recently. Until Annie.

* * *

The yurt in which Ben and Annie lived was large and round, a leftover from the Island's atomic testing days. Ten-year-old Ethan moved in with them, almost as if he were their own child. Ben and Annie hung a sheet down the center, dividing it into two rooms.

After Ethan had gone out to join the fishermen, after Annie had made her morning pilgrimage to the shore to be sick, she and Ben would lie together, her pale body crossed by sun-shadows. They were alone, gloriously alone, and even Richard had given up on them. He let them be. The quiet moments right after dawn were theirs, all theirs.

After making love, they would dress and emerge to the routines of the day. Octopus had to be strung on lines, then hung out to dry. Ben helped drag in the fishermen's nets, full and heavy with pink, yellow or blue-gray fish. The women sat in clusters, mending nets, shelling clams or scallops, or just talking. Annie, his pearl, sat in the center of the warm and protective shell of the women of the Good People, a small smile on her round, sweet face.

Sometimes Ben and Richard would hunt, or join Widmore on his horse-taming and breeding expeditions. A small herd roamed the Island, the lead mare proud and independent, letting no one near her. Widmore had already captured one of her herd, a yearling who still refused to submit to the bridle.

Flax in the wide, fertile fields of the North Mesa had all sprouted into a wide swath of flowers, each like a tiny blue chip of sky fallen to earth. It would be a good harvest, and Ben looked forward to it all: the reaping, crushing the fibers, the spinning, the dyeing. Annie had already learned to weave, her small loom warped with thick white string.

For the first time in his life, Ben knew happiness.

One small blot marred the brightness, like a black dot which floats across the vision and can't be blinked away. The women of the Good People knew little of the ways of childbirth, and had only the vaguest understanding how to care for someone in Annie's condition.

As her belly grew, Annie's sickness didn't stop. Wasn't it supposed to? she wanted to know. No one had an answer. Now she was sick in the evenings, too, and the others in the camp looked askance at her, behind her back.

One evening she crept to Ben and cried on his shoulder, saying that she felt like "a monster." It was true in a sense, for among the Good People Annie had become an object of both wonder and fear. Then, on the day when she couldn't get out of bed, the wonder mutated into terror, and no one felt that terror more acutely than Ben.

* * *

Every sign was poor, as Annie lay on her cot weak with exhaustion. So that she could rest, Ethan was made to move in with a couple of the older boys. Sometimes at night, Ben heard through thin fabric walls the taunting voices of the bigger boys, followed by Ethan's sniffles and sharp yelps of pain. Then came the silence.

Ben tried not to think about it too much.

He lay by Annie's side, telling himself that her trembling spasms weren't really seizures, just fatigue. She grabbed his hand and pressed it against her belly, hard. "Do you feel anything?" she asked, over and over.

He felt nothing, but said that he did, anyway. She closed her eyes, comforted by his lie.

Worse, Annie started to bleed. It wasn't heavy, no more than the first or second day of a woman's cycle, but it didn't let up. Even the women with no direct experience of babies knew this was wrong. The dried moss which they used for their own monthly needs did nothing to staunch the tide. The women fed Annie broth made from drained animals' blood, but it did no good.

The only mercy was that by now, she was too weak to panic.

Ben knew she was going to die before she did. He sat by her side in the yurt, gripping her cold, sweating hand. Ethan was tall for his age, gifted with extraordinary intelligence and an almost sadistic intensity of purpose. He had already worked out his own revenge on his tent-mates, and now they avoided him, entering their yurt only to sleep, and even then with one eye open.

The boy's uncut brown hair fell over his eyes as he sat with Ben, both of them watching Annie's every move and breath. When she became delirious she called for Amy, not her mother, and Ethan cried a little. It was the first emotion over his dead parents Ethan had ever shown.

Ben wasn't there when she died. Widmore had sent him to spy on some French research scientists who had landed on the south point of Pala Peninsula. By the time Ben returned, they had already laid her cold, inert body in the burial tent.

The Good People committed their dead to the earth in several ways. Those who lived near the coast ignited the remains and cast them out to sea. Or, if they lived inland, they built a pyre. This was more chancy, as gathering that much wood took time, and there was always the danger that some dark spirit might seek out and claim the newly-dead.

Widmore held his tongue while they discussed it. He despised these superstitions.

Ben couldn't bear the thought of burning Annie and the child curled up inside of her. So out of sympathy for Ben, Widmore grudgingly allowed the third way.

In the dead of night they formed a long, torch-lit procession. Over his shoulder, Ben bore Annie, wrapped in the white cloth which had hung down the center of their yurt. There was no need for it anymore. Ethan walked alongside Ben silently, his stolid face set in stony, un-childlike anger.

Amid the huge, twisting roots of an ancient banyan tree, the Good People dug her grave. Ben curled her body into the customary fetal position and then, almost as an afterthought, laid beside her the little wooden doll of himself, which she had carved so long ago.

"Now we never have to be away from each other," he whispered, before casting the first shovelful of earth.

* * *

Opinions differed as to why Annie had died. The women couldn't find anything in her past or character to blame, which left them mostly silent. Then, one afternoon Ben overheard a couple of the men, whose casual remarks sent a spear of ice through Ben's guts.

"Maybe it was the gas," one man suggested.

"How d'you figure?" his companion said.

"Some were more sensitive to it than others. Those died right away. But remember how many we had to shoot afterwards?"

"Yeah, gas could've got her anyway. Damn shame, that. She was a nice girl." Then the two of them went back to their game of checkers, pushing around colored sea-shells on a crude, hand-painted board.

That evening, Richard came upon Ben as he sat in the banyan's cool green shadows, gazing at the freshly-dug grave mound. Ben had moved away the branches which concealed Annie's grave, leaving the red earth as naked and raw as the expression on his face.

"You've got to cover that up," Richard said. "You know the rules."

"Go to hell," Ben said in a calm, conversational tone.

Richard shouldn't have looked as shaken as he did. After he pulled himself together, he told Ben that Widmore wanted to see him.

Hot flames of rebellion licked Ben from the inside out when Widmore told him of his next mission. He was to go back to Pala and kill the French woman, the only survivor of the scientific team. Further, Ben was to take Ethan with him. It was to be the boy's first experience with "cleansing the Island," as Widmore called it. The boy was practically dancing with excitement as Ben left Widmore's tent, gripping Widmore's loaded pistol tightly in his hand.

Ben told Ethan to go gather their few supplies, more to get the boy out of his hair than anything else. He weighed the gun in his hand, gazing over at Widmore and Richard as they drank tea and talked in front of the camp's central fire. He opened the weapon and gazed into the chamber. Only four bullets. Widmore certainly was stingy with his ammunition.

Well, that was a number Ben could work with. After he took care of the French woman, he'd have a little surprise for the camp when he got back. One for Widmore, one for Richard (_let's see __whether __that cock and bull story is true, or __if__ Richard can actually die like other men_), and one for himself.

Ethan would get by without him. Maybe he'd even be better off.

It was dark by the time Ben and Ethan arrived at the French woman's camp site. She lay asleep in the shadows, a fluffy aureole of hair surrounding her soft face, and younger than he had expected. He had imagined a woman more like those of the Good People, who even when young wore hard faces with tough skins, their hair frizzed by sun and sea-winds.

The French woman stirred in her sleep much in the way Annie used to, with a gentle sigh. The moon caught the roundness of her cheek, making a bright crescent line, one you might stroke ever so lightly with your fingers.

Her moonlit beauty held Ben captive for a few long seconds. It was hard to believe that she had killed her remaining team. Ethan chafed at the wait, anxious to begin.

Ben shushed him and moved forward. It was then that he heard the small whimper, the cry which broke the stillness of the night, and roused the French woman from her sleep.

A baby. A little one, too.

In the remaining instant before the French woman started to scream, Ben had already decided. He scooped the infant into his arms, pressing it close to his chest. Her babbling cries filled the night, but Ben didn't care, almost didn't even hear them.

_You doubted Jacob_, he told himself. _Richard was righ__t when he said y__ou have no patience. Annie's gone, and your own child with her. But here's another one, almost dumped right into your lap. Why are you hesitating? You want Jacob to gift-wrap it for you?_

The Island took, but the Island gave, too. Ben brandished the pistol that he would never use on the screaming woman, then drove her away with one shot fired into the air. "_Alex_," she kept calling out. "_Mon Alex_."

"Come on," Ben snarled at Ethan. They ran until the French woman's sobs faded into the night.

"Why didn't you do it?" Ethan kept asking over and over. "And what d'you want one of those for?" The boy glared at the small bundle in Ben's arms.

Ben said nothing, just marched along through the night. It wasn't until the fires of the Good People's camp could be seen through the black screen of tree branches that Ben thought to unwrap the baby's blanket. Pulling aside the soft wad of moss which served as a diaper, he saw that the child was a little girl.

"Alex," he said to himself softly. "Alexandra."

Later that night, Ben handed the pistol back to Widmore, along with a scathing look of contempt. Then, when tiny Alex sent up a long siren-wail of hunger, he silently packed his bags, tied the howling baby to his chest with a strip of cloth, and stood for a long, tense moment in the center of the camp.

"I'm going back to the Barracks," Ben said in a clear voice full of confidence. "There are things I need there. Anyone who wants to join me is welcome."

A good half of Jacob's People followed him, including most of the women. Widmore watched them leave, hatred gleaming in his eyes in the red firelight. Richard said nothing.

Luckily for Ben and Alex both, Horace and Amy had never gotten rid of Ethan's crib or cloth diapers. Amy had breast-fed Ethan, though, and Ben almost gave in to black panic until one of the older women mentioned that Dr. Chang's wife once had an infant, too. An hour later, Alex was contentedly sucking away at a bottle of canned-milk formula, and Ben thought to himself that living was a sweet thing to do, after all.

Two weeks later, Widmore joined the Good People at the Barracks. He moved into a cottage as if it had been his idea all along, ignoring the light of revenge which always shone in Ben's eyes.

Alex thrived, and grew into a plump, laughing baby. Right about the time she learned to walk, another woman of their number fell pregnant. This one lasted a little longer than Annie had, almost six months, but she too had seizures, bled, fell unconscious, and died.

For Ben and Jacob's People, that was the year everything changed.

(_the end_)


End file.
